Announcements

Michael Faris posted a call recently for a blog carnival on Geoffrey Sirc's recent CCC review essay, "Resisting Entropy" 63.3 (Feb. 2012). All are welcome to participate in this emerging conversation.  Simply read the review essay, write and post a response on your blog, and follow the instructions for submitting the link.

By enrolling in ENGL479: Peer Tutoring, you can

• learn strategies for becoming a peer tutor
• gain experience in peer tutoring
• qualify to become a paid peer tutor in the University Writing Center (UWC) in future semesters

For an application form and more information, contact Joy Versluis at jversluis@emich.edu. Applications are due Friday, February 24, 2012. Interviews will be held in mid-March. For more information about the University Writing Center or the Peer Tutoring Initiative, please contact Dr. Ann Blakeslee, UWC Director, at ann.blakeslee@emich.edu.

The Eastern Michigan Writing Project is now accepting applications to participate in the 2012 Summer Invitational Institute, June 21-July 19, 2012.  Applications are due Friday, March 2, 2012. Learn more about this opportunity at the EMWP web site.

The Summer Invitational Institute is an intensive four-week session designed for teachers and administrators (K-College) concerned with the teaching of writing in any subject area and interested in staff development opportunities. We seek teacher applicants who demonstrate their commitment to the teaching of writing and who wish to expand their knowledge. We encourage teachers from all disciplines and grade levels to apply. Some activities during the Institute include:

• Writing and responding to each other's writing
• Reading and talking about current research in the teaching of writing
• Demonstrating to each other our own teaching practices
• Learning from other teacher consultants who continue their research in the field

Works in Progress: An Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference
May 31, 2012
University of Cincinnati
Department of English & Comparative Literature
Cincinnati, OH

The English Department at the University of Cincinnati invites you to submit proposals for an interdisciplinary academic conference focusing on the value of sharing works in progress as a means to increase experimentation, build community, and test new ideas. Rather than soliciting finished products from participants, we seek work that shows its seams, represents thinking in action, invites revision, and resists closure. In other words, don't hide your process; advertise it.

The deadline for submission of proposals is March 30th, 2012. Send proposals and queries to zlabekkm@mail.uc.edu. Individual presentations should not exceed twenty minutes; panel presentations should plan for 80 minutes total (including Q&A time).

Mindful of the financial pressures we all face, there will be no fee to attend or present at this graduate conference.

Irene Little Wallace Scholarship

This scholarship comes with a minimum, one-time award of $500. Students applying for the award must be undergraduate majors in English--all English programs eligible--with a GPA of at least 3.0 and demonstrated financial need. Applications are due in hard-copy to the English Department in Pray-Harrold and should be directed to the attention of Professor Melissa Jones. Students who do not receive the award upon first application are encouraged to resubmit. Deadlines for submission are listed below.

To apply, a student must submit the following:

• Coversheet including: Full name and e-mail address, student EID, local address, permanent address, local phone number, and permanent phone number.
• A one-page summary of the following information: major, class level, cumulative GPA, GPA in major, current enrollment hours, planned enrollment hours next semester, and the name of a faculty recommender.
• A letter of support from a faculty member that speaks to the student's academic abilities and overall potential. This should be addressed to Professor Jones and can be sent separately.
• A short essay describing academic and professional goals and achievements, including a statement showing evidence of financial need (500-800 words).

The deadline for Fall 2011 applications for this scholarship is Friday, December 16, 2011.

ENGL310: Writing and Civic Literacy

John Dunn | Tuesdays and Thursdays 11-12:15 p.m. (CRN 27181)

In our lives all of us encounter language and symbols that we share with those close to us, discourse that arises from the specialized expertise we employ in school and the workplace, as well as public arguments and appeals that circulate around the responsibilities of citizenship in a democracy. Taken together, our participation in what rhetorician Thomas Goodnight has termed these three spheres of argument helps form our sense of identity as well as allows us to recognize and enact the aspirations that inspire us. Recent events such as the Occupy protests, however, point up the challenge contemporary citizens, especially college students, often feel in making connections across these spheres of argument, especially between compelling matters in their personal and professional lives, and the possibilities for political change in the public sphere. Over more than 2000 years, the Rhetorical Tradition has provided citizens with tools, techniques, as well as a rationale for enacting versions of civic literacy that can help us connect personal, professional, and public life in order to work toward collective change. As an intermediate-level course in the Written Communication major, ENGL310, then, takes the lived experience of students as a starting point for the study of rhetoric. During this course, we'll read nonfiction accounts such as Tamara Draut's Strapped: Why America's 20- and 30-Somethings Can't Get Ahead to understand some of the specific economic and political challenges college students face today. We'll use autobiographical writing and revision to identify values and goals in our personal and professional lives that can guide our future plans. We'll study some of the ways rhetoricians through the ages have understood the responsibilities and opportunities of citizenship as well as the notion of the public good. We'll then explore the range of discourse - texts, media, and other symbolic action - available to represent what matters to us for public audiences that can help bring about change in different parts of our lives. Based on these major projects, you'll develop a final portfolio containing a collection of writing and related media that you can apply in your life going forward both as a student of rhetoric and a contemporary citizen in a changing society.

ENGL 328: Writing, Style, and Technology

Derek Mueller | Online (CRN 27638) and Honors (CRN 20732) Tuesdays and Thursdays, 11-12:15 p.m.

ENGL328 is a course designed to introduce you to the juncture shared among composing practices, stylistic knowledge, and writing technologies, new and old. We will explore the ways in which style, as a canon of rhetoric, pertains to a wide variety of genres, from conventional academic prose to new and emerging writing platforms online. Our examination of these genres will involve a considerable amount of writing insofar as we will not only study about the adaptive interplay between style and technology, but we will explore it first-hand, practicing stylishly in selected projects. Thus, the course consists of at least two dimensions: it is, on the one hand, a guided intellectual inquiry into what has happened where style and technology converge, and, on the other hand, a hands-on, studio-like venue for experimenting with writing, style, and technology.

ENGL 417: Rhetoric and the Written Word

John Dunn | Tuesdays-Thursdays 3:30-4:45 p.m. (CRN 27182)

ENGL417 explores a number of major definitions for the concept of rhetoric, each of which has implications for how you as a student of Written Communication might pursue your interests around composing, consuming, and interpreting discourse, whether here in the undergraduate major or as you plan career options in areas such as professional writing, technical communication, writing studies, or education. In particular, we'll look at some influential versions of rhetoric and the ways each can help you as a writer, reader, and citizen, among these, rhetoric as persuasion, rhetoric as a productive art, rhetoric as social action, rhetoric as a circulation system, and rhetoric as a constitutive act involving collective and individual identity formation. To guide us, we'll consider how each version of rhetoric addresses the key factors in any act of writing or reading, what theorists call the rhetorical triangle, emphasizing matters of text, audience, subject, genre, and authorship. Among some of the technical concepts of rhetoric we'll consider include the rhetorical canon of invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery; the rhetorical situation and rhetorical stance; audience analysis; topoi and the means of persuasion; the Pentad and terministic screens; spheres of argument; stasis theory; rhetorical personae and constitutive rhetoric; genre theory; and activity systems, among others. For each approach we'll study some of the major classical and contemporary theorists then apply key concepts to a collection of discourse (writing, media, and other symbolic action) which you gather on topics from your life that matter to you. Based on this analysis, we'll then try out a variety of strategies for composing and interpreting discourse that can help you persuasively adapt your ideas and beliefs to the expectations of audiences and occasions you encounter in everyday life. Besides examples of nonacademic and public discourse, some assigned and some that you recommend, course readings will feature excerpts from classical and contemporary rhetorical theorists such as Aristotle, Kenneth Burke, Lloyd Bitzer, Wayne Booth, Maurice Charland, Cicero, Sharon Crowley, Walker Gibson, Thomas Goodnight, Richard Lanham, Carolyn Miller, Walter Ong, Chaim Perelman, David Russell, John Trimbur, and Michael Warner, among others.

ENGL 444: Writing for the World Wide Web

Steve Krause | Online (CRN 26825)

This is a course about writing and the World Wide Web in at least two different and related ways. First, we will be reading, "browsing," and writing about the World Wide Web in order to understand how the web works rhetorically. Second, we will be writing "on" the web with blogs, wikis, Tweets, "good web sites," and a few other related things. As the title of the course suggests, students will be required to work with and explore the basic HTML and CSS coding that makes the web work. The course is available for graduate student credit. As an online course, students are required to have regular computer and internet access.

ENGL 515: Literacy and Written Literacy Instruction

Bill Tucker | Tuesdays 6:30-9:10 p.m. (CRN 22001)

Literacy is an academically and politically volatile term: we will examine definitions, issues, and theories of literacy and how these inform approaches to writing instruction, especially in secondary and college classrooms. To this end we will write personally, reflectively, ethnographically and authoritatively to explore versions of literacy. We will investigate a case of young adult or adult literacy. We will demonstrate classroom models of new literacy and their implications for theory and standards. We will respond thoughtfully and civilly to each others' writing and speculations and seek to understand our local versions of literacy.

ENGL 516: Computers and Writing: Theory and Practice

Derek Mueller | Thursdays 6:30-9:10 p.m. (CRN 24758)

Computers and Writing, a sub-field of Rhetoric and Composition, attends to the interplay of newer, networked technologies and composing practices, broadly conceived. With an explicit orientation to the scholarship associated with this sub-field, ENGL516 provides students with an advanced study of theoretical and practical dimensions of teaching writing with computer technology. Thus, this course is concerned both with teaching and practicing writing in digital environments and, also, with the ways an expanding digital milieu transforms rhetoric, writing, teaching, classroom spaces, curricula. Our general purpose is to grapple with some of these changes in the interest of becoming more deliberative, adept, and inventive as teachers, writers, and thinkers.

Provisional projects will include a C&W micro-anthology, a Teacher-Innovator's Cookbook, and an in-class presentation. We will read selected articles online and as PDFs in addition to the following books:

• Stuart Selber, Multiliteracies for a Digital Age, 2004, ISBN 0809325519.
• Devoss, Hicks, and Eidman-Aadahl, Because Digital Writing Matters, 2010, ISBN 987047040772.
• Wysocki, Anne Francis et al. Writing New Media. Logan: Utah State UP, 2004. ISBN 0-87421-575-7.

ENGL 517: Topics in the Teaching of Writing: Women's Rhetoric

Cheryl Cassidy | Wednesdays 6:30-9:10 p.m. (CRN 24759)

This graduate course is designed to acquaint students with the rhetorical and stylistic structure of women's writing. My aim here is to broaden our ideas of how women look at the world and to undercover those perceptions in their discourses. Despite advances made in Women Studies, large numbers of students remain unschooled in the process of textual interpretations. Where much work has been accomplished in examining women's fiction, women's non-fiction prose has received less attention. This course unravels the internal and external structures of women's non-fiction prose from the late nineteenth century to the present. We will focus on women's voices, both in the multiplicity of those voices and in the variety of individual voices from letters, essays and articles.

The course is divided into three sections:

• Part I: Travel Writing/Joining the Fray looks at late nineteenth-century American female missionary letters and articles from evangelical monthly journals as well as excerpts from female travel writers.
• Part II: Social Commentary/Exploring Boundaries examines writers whose essays center on the evolving social order and its influence on women's lives in the early 20th century.
• Part III: Ourselves in the World/Breaking Free: looks at a variety of women writers from the late 1970s through the present, focusing on how women writers renew our sense of the world, create (and exchange) stories of self, other and community, and approach the significant issues of our time. This portion of the course will examine blogging and social networking in electronic landscapes.

ENGL 527: Topics in Professional Communication: Multimedia Writing

Steve Krause | Mondays 6:30-9:10 p.m. and online (hybrid) (CRN 23310)

Multimedia Writing will be a workshop-oriented and collaboratively intense course where students will learn about multimedia texts (that is, writing that is not words alone but also includes audio, images, and video) by producing these texts. While we will read and discuss some of the theoretical implications of working with multimedia, the emphasis will be on producing multimedia with readily available tools. Along the way, we will contemplate the basic question of the class: what do writing professionals need to know about "non-print" writing tools?

A Quick Rhetoric of QR Codes

Tuesday, November 8, 2011
3 p.m., Ford Hall

Over the last half-decade, Quick Response Codes, or two-dimensional barcodes, have sprung up quickly (if indiscriminately) across the North American visual landscape. For better or worse, designers are placing them almost everywhere: on the rooftops of big box retailers, on grave markers, on the sides of public buses, on college admissions materials, on tattooed skin, on the decals stuck to bunches of bananas, and so on. In this skeptical introduction to QR Codes, Derek Mueller, Assistant Professor of Written Communication at EMU, will suggest a series of rhetorical principles for guiding the integration of QR codes into visual designs.

All are welcome--students, faculty, and staff--to participate in a weekly Writers Circle: a space for writing, doing some exploration, addressing issues that come up in writing (both personal and academic), creative workshops, etc.

For more information, contact Chelsea at clonsdal@emich.edu or visit the University Writing Center (115 Halle).

Internet maven and author David Weinberger will present on his new book, Too Big to Know, on Monday, October 3, from 3-5 p.m. at Blau Auditorium (Ross School of Business). Weinberger's visit is sponsored by the UMSI and is featured as the annual John Seely Brown Symposium, which attracts notable scholars and thinkers to Ann Arbor. According to the UMSI announcement, the event is free and open to the public.

The 27th annual Liberal Arts Network for Development (LAND) Conference will be held February 15-17, 2012, at Northwestern Michigan College and Park Place Hotel in Traverse City, Michigan. The theme for the conference is "Enhancing Student Engagement." Proposals to present at the conference are being accepted until November 14, 2011.

Please join us for presentations of projects from recent graduates of the WRCM MA program at EMU:
 

Presentations will be followed by Q&A and general conversation.

Why you should attend:

• Learn a bit about successful projects and the students who carried them out
• Begin (or continue) thinking about your own MA project
• Talk with faculty and students about the program and your interests (i.e., develop a sense of the WRCM program's culture, get to know people, etc.)
• Free cookies

Call for proposals: MA Programs at Work (Proposal deadline: Sept. 30, 2011)

For those seeking a Ph.D., the Masters of Arts degree is a necessary stepping stone. Stand alone M.A. programs, often referred to as "terminal," can suggest a premature endpoint or confer second-class status upon this form of advanced study. Recently, scholars have begun to recognize the value of a degree which serves widely diverse audiences with equally diverse career goals, working within and beyond the academy.

We seek contributions for an edited collection entitled, MA Programs at Work, which examines the contemporary state of the M.A. in English and imagines its future. Scholars might address the following questions (among others): How are generalist M.A. programs meeting the needs of the local communities they serve? How does the rise of the M.A. in Writing Studies reflect the changing face of English Studies? In what ways can an M.A. in English prepare middle and secondary school instructors to teach literature and writing? How do state and institutional exigencies affect the mission and curricula of M.A. programs?

Interested contributors should send a 500-word proposal to Margaret M. Strain (margaret.strain@notes.udayton.edu) and Rebecca Potter (rebecca.potter@notes.udayton.edu) by September 30, 2011.

The 2012 Computers and Writing Conference, hosted by North Carolina State University, is now accepting proposals.  The conference, which will be held Thursday, May 17 through Sunday, May 20, is themed "ArchiTEXTure: Composing and Constructing in Digital Spaces":

Under this theme, we encourage submitters to consider issues, challenges, and benefits specifically related to the production of digital texts. Additionally, submissions are encouraged to consider questions that both address "archiTEXTure" in the classroom and as part of a scholarly agenda.

The event will include keynotes by David Parry, Anne Wysocki, and Alex Reid.

The Rhetoric Society of America is accepting proposals for its 15th biennial conference, "Re/Framing Identifications," to be held May 25-28, 2012, in Philadelphia, Pa. Proposals are due via electronic submission no later than Friday, Sept. 16, 2011.

The Michigan State University Writing and Digital Environments Research Center and the EMU Written Communication Program invite you (faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, teachers, community members, anyone interested) to propose ideas that will seed a free (un)conference on Saturday, October 15, 2011 in Ypsilanti, Michigan. We seek proposals that engage the framing question for this inaugural event, a question both straight-forward and ambiguous at same time:

What evidence do we have that teaching writing--especially in digital environments--works?

Learn more about this event at https://sites.google.com/site/wideemu11/.

Make arrangements to attend Copyright Camp, Friday, July 29, from 1-5 p.m. at the Hatcher Library on the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor. The featured speaker is Deborah Wythe from the Brooklyn Museum's Digital Collections and Services Department. Participants in this free unconference will learn about copyright, Creative Commons, and the future of digital archives.  A limited number of seats are available, so don't delay in signing up for this event.

2011 HASTAC Conference at University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

The University of Michigan will be hosting the 2011 annual HASTAC Conference on its Ann Arbor campus December 2-3, 2011. We invite proposals for presentations on the general theme of Digital Scholarly Communication. More details about the conference theme are available here, and the proposal submission form is available here.

Revised deadline for submission: July 1, 2011 Sept. 15, 2011

To submit a proposal for the 2012 CCCC Digital Pedagogy Poster sessions, complete the form at http://creator.zoho.com/stcs/cccc-12-digital-posters/#. This year's conference will be held in St. Louis, Mo., March 21-24.

The soft deadline for poster proposals is Monday, July 3rd. If you are considering your options, here are the answers to questions most frequently asked about these posters:

• Your participation this year will NOT count as your "one presentation" at CCCC.
• We will have our own "room" for these posters and they will be held between Thurs - Sat., not on Wed.
• These poster proposals will be reviewed (outside the formal CCCC review process). After which we will provide you, early in the fall, with an official letter from the 7Cs indicating that your proposal was reviewed and that you will be presenting in St. Louis.
• Names will also be in an official Digital Pedagogy program and on the CCCC conference site.
  

Once again, interested folks should take a few minutes to fill out the form at http://creator.zoho.com/stcs/cccc-12-digital-posters/#. If you have any trouble with the site, just send this information to Dickie Selfe at selfe.3@osu.edu.

Proposals include:

• Full name, affiliation, and contact information.
• A short ~50 word description of your Digital Pedagogy approach or assignment
• A spiffy title
• A statement about what would constitute ideal equipment for your poster
• Your team members' names and email

EMU Professor of Written Communication, Dr. Steven Krause, was honored with the 2011 John Lovas Memorial Weblog Award at the Computers and Writing Conference in Ann Arbor, Mich., on Friday, May 20. The annual award is "given in recognition of the valuable contributions that bloggers have made to the discipline and in recognition and remembrance of John Lovas's contributions to the legitimation of academic blogging." The presenter of the award said Krause was noticed both for his blogging at stevendkrause.com and for EMUTalk.org.

Ten Written Communication faculty, graduate students, and alums presented on five panels at the 2011 Computers and Writing Conference in Ann Arbor, Mich., May 19-21. 

C02 - Panel: Motion, Media, Method, Materiality (Derek Mueller, WRCM faculty)
E13 - Roundtable: Is Blogging Dead? Yes, No, Other (Steven Krause, WRCM faculty)
F03 - Panel: Assessing Technology Needs in a Large University Writing Program: A Pilot Study to Identify Options for Implementing E-Portfolios (Sarah Karlis, Carrie Luke, Dave Nassar, WRCM graduate students, and John Dunn, Jr., WRCM faculty)
H13 - Panel: Exploring Ethical and Public Discourses in New Media: Digital Storytelling and Online Forums (Scott Kowalewski, Virginia Tech, WRCM alum)
J12 - Panel: Negotiating Knowledge-Construction and Audiences: Pedagogical Possibilities and Constraints of Wikis, Social Media, and Multi-Media Assignments (Ann Blakeslee, WRCM faculty; Rhonda McCaffery, Iowa State, WRCM alum; and, Steve Benninghoff, WRCM faculty)

The three-day conference features 133 concurrent sessions.

ENGL503: Rhetorical Theory and the Teaching of Writing
M, 6:30-9-10 p.m., CRN 12128 (Arrington)
A thematic course in which students read, study and analyze representative selections from classical, medieval, renaissance and modern theorists. Emphasis on applying rhetorical theories to writing and language instruction.

ENGL505: Rhetoric of Science and Technology
M, 6:30-9:10 p.m., CRN 16632 (Mueller)
In ENGL505, we will examine rhetorical dimensions of selected scientific and technological discourses. Science and technology researchers (oftentimes in close collaboration with technical communicators) construct, debate, and negotiate their innovations and insights. They must act rhetorically, crafting and circulating accounts in richly mediated and rhetorically complex systems. But how does this happen? What motivates decision-making? What can we learn--as technical and professional writers--from identifiable successes and failures in particular cases? We will study and apply rhetorical perspectives from Kenneth Burke, I.A. Richards, Jeanne Fahnestock, S. Michael Halloran, and Carolyn Miller to contemporary sci-tech events, e.g., the Fukushima radiation crisis, the BP oil spill, Climategate, the discovery of microbial alien life, and the reclassification of Pluto. Readings will include Brown and Duguid's The Social Life of Information (ISBN 0875847625), Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live By (ISBN 9780226468013), and Latour's Science in Action (ISBN 069102832X).

ENGL514: Issues in Teaching Writing
M, 6:30-9:10 p.m., CRN 11302 (Baker)
A review of the research and theory in teaching writing, with focus on the dynamics of writing and learning, and their relationship to evaluation and assessment of writing.

ENGL517: The Rhetoric of War: Language as Power and Betrayal
R, 6:30-9:10 p.m., CRN 16884 (Miller)
This course examines the rhetoric used to provoke and justify war, a venue where language is most relevant and compelling, embracing as it does matters of life and death. Topics to be explored include the language used by soldiers to cope with war and its aftermath, the language of witchcraft, glory, and sacrifice as each pertains to war, and the language of women and war in the former's various roles as war's antithesis, mourners of war dead, and purveyors of "Dear John" letters. As indicated by the course's subtitle, the emphasis throughout is on the power of language to shape and ultimately create reality, and in that context its power both to betray and to overcome betrayal.

ENGL530: Issues in English Studies for Teachers
W, 6:30-9:10 p.m., CRN 13308 (Baker)
An introduction to foundational and current issues in the field of English Education. Students will study the work of leading scholars, past and present controversies and recurring areas of concern which have helped shape the discipline.

ENGL596: Teaching Composition on the College Level
T, 5-7:40 p.m., CRN 13306 (Dunn)
A course in the methods of teaching English composition, with particular attention to beginning courses on the college and junior college level. Required of all graduate assistants and open to other interested M.A. candidates.
 
ENGL621: Research in Theory and Practice of Writing
R, 6:30-9:10, CRN 13310 (Krause)
A course designed to prepare students in methods of research on writing, pedagogy, professional writing and written discourse. Frequent projects, requiring research and writing.

Faculty New Publications Lecture Series
Thursday, April 7
4:00-5:30
Halle 320

Children and Empire
Profs. Cheryl Cassidy and Andrea Kaston Tange

Professors Cassidy and Kaston Tange will be sharing selections from their newest publication, Children and Empire (History of Feminism, Routledge), a four-book series that comprises primary sources from the 19th through early 20th centuries. Primary texts in the collection come from both the American and British empires and include fiction as well as non-fiction letters, biographical information, reports, and articles. Cheryl and Andrea will also be discussing the works' scholarly introductions and will be sharing some of the engravings and photographs that illustrate the collection.  

The Wide Road: A Collaborative Picaresque (co-written with Lyn Hejinian)
Prof. Carla Harryman

What would have happened had Thelma and Louise not driven off the cliff but stayed on the road? Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian's picaresque novella, The Wide Road, chases down this question in its exploration of how friendship lives on to follow eros through a polymorphic landscape where a fearless, inquisitive "we" encounters "hunger in two places at once." Carla will be sharing selections from the novel and talking about the process of writing collaboratively.

Please join the grad committee in continuing our "Faculty New Publications Lecture Series" intended to spotlight recent faculty publications across periods, genres, and program areas.  The series is intended to provide our graduate students with a sense of the different kinds of research we each do and, more broadly, with a sense of what constitutes a book-length research project in the field today.  It should also provide a rich forum for faculty to discuss and learn more about one another's work. Light refreshments will be provided.

Don't miss the 10th annual Celebration of Student Writing on Wednesday afternoon, March 30, from 4-5:30 p.m. in the Student Center Ballroom.  Hundreds of students and instructors will be showcasing the multigenre compositions they created this semester in sections of ENGL121: Researching the Public Experience.

EMU's newspaper, The Eastern Echo, recently ran a story by Jasmine Carter on the University Writing Center's expanded consulting services this year. Click on the link to "On-campus Writing Center helps students" for the complete article.

Interested in writing and submitting conference proposals? Join us for a 90-minute conference proposal writing workshop on Tuesday evening, April 19. The workshop will focus on genre conventions and proposal writing strategies. We will consider approaches to individual and panel proposals, especially mindful of the Call for Proposals for the CCCC Annual Convention in St. Louis, Mo, March 21-24, 2012. If you already have ideas or drafts, bring them with you (that said, all are welcome, regardless of whether you are planning to submit a proposal for the 2012 CCCC). The workshop will also provide you with an opportunity for assembling into panels and also for planning and developing a proposal.

For more information, contact Derek Mueller (derek.mueller@emich.edu) or John Dunn (jdunnjr@emich.edu).
CCCC 2012 Call for Proposals

Collaborvention 2011: A Computers and Writing Unconference

http://computersandwriting.org/collaborvention-2011-cfp

Having seen a surge of interest for an online conference that would take Computers and Writing in a new, more collaborative and less hierarchical direction, we announce Collaborvention 2011: A Computers and Writing Unconference. As with successful face-to-face unconferences, we hope to see collaboration and synthesis without formal proposals, acceptances, or a program set in stone before the online conference begins. This activity will take place during two windows.

1. Connections window: Starting immediately, participants can toss out ideas, put together events and connect with collaborators. We expect most of that activity to happen in cyberspace, using the #cwuncon hashtag, on listservs like techrhet and wpa-l, through collaborvention groups in social networks, through local collaborations, and in any other ways that will help the conference achieve a critical mass of interest and participation.
2. Unconference window: Between April 22nd and May 13th (prior to the f2f Computers and Writing conference) and between May 22nd and May 30th (after the f2f conference), the unconference window will open. Events during the unconference might take the form of a hosted conversation, a showcase of a project or activity, a presentation, or really anything. We also hope to see links develop between the unconference and the f2f conference on May 19-22.

As you begin planning your event with others, you'll want to review the Instructions for Submitting to Collaborvention 2011. The instructions will provide you with a link to the submission form for adding your event to the Collaborvention 2011 Event Schedule.

If you have questions regarding the conference that are not answered by the support documents on the Computers and Writing website, contact the unconference facilitators at cwuncon@gmail.com.

Submit a Proposal for WPA 2011: Frameworks for Success

In the midst of our busy everyday lives, sometimes it's challenging to find a quiet place to contemplate with friends our directions and opportunities. It can be especially daunting to find time to reflect on the successful features of our courses and programs. We hope that the 2011 CWPA conference will offer opportunities to share current successes and plan for future ones.

CWPA is eager to welcome the voices of people who participate in "writing program administration" writ large and who engage in myriad ways in the work associated with it. This could include work with writing centers; multiple sections or instructors of writing courses; work with community writing programs; course and program assessment; considering how to effectively make connections with others in the classroom, on campus, and beyond; or any other work that is related to writing instruction or program direction.

We invite four types of proposals to foster conversation that will bring together the multiple and varied voices of those with an interest in developing and directing writing programs. These voices include writing instructors (part- or full-time, graduate or lecturer, tenure-track or tenured); two- and four-year instructors; department chairs; writing center directors; directors of WAC and WID programs; institutional researchers; teaching and learning center directors, and others. These are:

• 6-minute individual presentations: Conversation Starters
• 10-minute individual presentations: Extended discussions
• Full sessions: Panel discussions (75 minutes total)
• Mentoring Project Sessions

Please review the information here about the different session types on the complete CFP, then proceed to Instructions for Submitting Your Proposal to WPA 2011 to submit one or more proposals.

Submitting Your Proposal

If you're ready to submit a proposal, go to Instructions for Submitting Your Proposal to WPA 2011

We look forward to receiving a variety of lively, engaging submissions from a range of participants, and to a fantastic conference!

Questions about proposal formats or CWPA 2011 should be directed to Duane Roen or Linda Adler-Kassner, conference co-chairs, and/or Irv Peckham or James McDonald, local co-chairs. Questions about mentoring project sessions should be sent to Joe Janangelo.

Feminist Challenges or Feminist Rhetorics?: Locations, Scholarship, and Discourse


Proposals due: April 25, 2011

This year's theme invites interested scholars and community members to join the Coalition of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition (CWSHRC) in looking through a feminist lens at the intersections between past, present, and future social challenges and related rhetorics. Questions to consider for panels, roundtables, and individual presentations include:

• What are the discourses of feminism? Where are they located?
• Where do we find feminist rhetorics? How do we understand the function of feminist rhetoric?
• What does feminist scholarship look like in the 21st century?
• How has interdisciplinarity had an impact on the feminist agenda?
• What is the politic of feminist scholarship?
• How do we understand the politics of inclusion in 21st-century feminism?
• How does feminist inquiry have an impact on our understanding of scholarship?
• What are the challenges faced by feminists inside and outside of the academy?
  

To learn more, visit http://tinyurl.com/FemRhet2011, come to the CWSHRC meeting on Wednesday, April 6 from 6-8pm at the CCCC in Atlanta, or email Kirsti Cole at kirsti [dot] cole [at] mnsu [dot] edu.

Proposals are due April 25, 2011. Acceptance will be sent out no later than May 15, 2011.

From a recent campus-wide announcement via email:

Eastern Michigan University's Undergraduate Symposium is scheduled for Friday, March 25, 2011. The event provides students selected and nominated by faculty members the opportunity to present scholarly research and creative work through oral presentations and poster displays.

The online nomination process is now open. Simply follow the link at http://www.emich.edu/symposium.

To participate a student must first be nominated by a faculty member who agrees to serve as the student's sponsor. The student then goes to the nomination website and submits an abstract and personal data sheet. Finally, the faculty member must review and approve the student's nomination. The student's participation is finalized with department approval of completed nominations and abstracts as sent forward to the event's planning committee.

If any of you have questions concerning the Symposium, or difficulties with the nomination process, please contact Bernie Miller, English Department Representative, Symposium 2011.

The Symposium web site will remain open for nominations through Friday, January 14, 2011.

Derek Mueller, Assistant Professor of Written Communication, will lead a Technovations workshop on Google Reader this Thursday, December 2, at 12:00 p.m. in Hall Library Room 110. The workshop, titled "How to Curate a Digital Antilibrary: An Introduction to Google Reader" is scheduled to last 55 minutes. All Technovations workshops are offered through the Bruce K. Nelson Faculty Development Center. The session description follows:

In The Black Swan Nassim Nicholas Taleb begins with a vignette about Umberto Eco's personal collection of more than 3,000 books. The impressive collection is notable, Taleb writes, not because of its magnitude or because of how favorably it reflects on the mind of its collector, but because enmeshed within it is a humbling collection of books Eco has not read: an antilibrary. A source of humility and great inventive potential, an antilibrary is the slice of any collection its curator has not read. Drawing on this anecdote, I plan to introduce attendees to Google Reader, a free, online platform for managing subscriptions to RSS feeds.

Join us at the:

Annual MA in Written Communication Celebration of Recent Graduates

When: Thursday, December 2, 2010, 6 p.m.-9 p.m.
Where: Room 310B, EMU Student Center
What: A chance to hear recent MA Graduates discuss their research projects and experiences in our programs in Written Communication.

Please join us to listen to some of our recent graduates offer brief presentations about the writing projects they completed to satisfy the requirements for their Master of Arts in Written Communication. This event both celebrates their accomplishments and it offers encouragement to current students in our program.

Following this event, the celebration will continue at Frenchie's, the special events area next to The Sidetrack in Depot Town. Come by to share some hospitality with faculty, current students, recent graduates, and friends of the program!

Feel free to "drop in" for any part of the afternoon's events when you can--we know that everyone has busy schedules. And feel free to bring family and friends! For more information, contact Cheryl Cassidy at cheryl.cassidy@emich.edu.

Spring 2011:

ENGL444: Writing for the World Wide Web

Professor Steven D. Krause | Online

This is a course about writing and the World Wide Web in at least two different and related ways. First, we will be reading, "browsing," and writing about the World Wide Web in order to understand how the web works rhetorically. Second, we will be writing "on" the web with blogs, wikis, Tweets, "good web sites," and a few other related things. As the title of the course suggests, students will be required to work with and explore the basic HTML and CSS coding that makes the web work. The course is available for graduate student credit. As an online course, students are required to have regular computer and internet access.

Summer 2011:

Fall 2011:

ENGL328: Writing, Style, and Technology

Professor Steven D. Krause | Online

In this course, we will explore the ways in which the concepts of "style" and "technology" interact with each other and affect writing in a variety of different contexts: traditional essays, writing inventions, and short videos. Along the way, you will keep a blog and you will learn a lot about various "Web 2.0" technologies. As an online course, students are required to have regular computer and internet access.

ENGL354: Critical Digital Literacies

Professor Steven D. Krause | MW 3:30-4:45PM

English 354 counts as a Restricted Elective for any of the Written Communication major tracks, it counts for the writing minor, and for many other English specializations. While employers still definitely want good writers in the "old school" sense, today more and more digital writing and communication technologies are hot tickets that can be the difference that sets you above comparable job candidates. Indeed, writing work today is often hard to separate from technology and new digital tools: writers design mixed media projects, work with graphics and video, and whole new job categories are arising like being a company's "social media strategist," just to name a few ways digital literacy is valuable on the job today.

Learn more about  EMU's updated Written Communication Major at an open advising session during the week of October 18-22.  Written Communication faculty will be available to answer your questions, describe the classes they teach, and visit with you one-on-one in Room 104 of the Student Center at the following dates and times:

• Monday, Oct. 18, from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m.
• Tuesday, Oct. 19, from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m.
• Thursday, Oct. 21, from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m.

If you would like to learn more but cannot attend open advising at one of these times, please contact Professor Cheryl Cassidy, Written Communication Coordinator, at cheryl.cassidy@emich.edu.

Did you know EMU's Written Communication Program recently revamped its major?  The new major includes two new courses: ENGL310: Writing and Civic Literacy and ENGL354: Critical Digital Literacies.  Both classes will be offered for the first time in the Winter 2010 semester.  Enroll early while there is room available in these exciting new courses. For more information about the Written Communication undergraduate major, please view or print the flier posted below, or attend one of the open advising sessions held in Room 104 of the Student Center during the week of October 18-22.